social justice movement terminology for interpreters and translators - because more bilingual movements are stronger movements!

Friday, November 9, 2007

campesino (redux)

campesino: family farmer (campesino)

In my previous entry for campesino I argued for importing, and keeping it as campesino. I still think that in a lot of movement contexts this is best, but in the recent Witness for Peace newsletter (not yet online) I noticed that they used "family farmer". I like this much better than the "small farmer" I gave as the other option to campesino. Obviously "family farmer" has different emotional weight in the U.S. than campesino, and I think it's a wise move for drawing connections and making a political impact. Of course the life of a family farmer in the US is quite different than that of a Colombian campesino, but both are being squeezed out by corporate agribusiness and "free" trade agreements.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Family farmer is a terrible translation for campesino, a term which includes all who work on the land, including those who work for a jornada, wage, or salary such as raspachines (coca harvesters), farmworkers on large agribusiness operations, as well as sharecroppers and others working under any of numerous other arrangements.

absolutely. this is precisely the point I made in my first entry for campesino, where I argued for leaving it as campesino for just this reason. what I was trying to argue here is that sometimes, for political lobbying, this could be a savvy, though not encompassing, translation.

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decolonizing solidarity

My other bloglooks at colonial patterns in international solidarity and ways that we might change them, and talks about my research on international accompaniment and how it uses difference and privilege to make space for peace. The latest entries are listed below.